Related papers: Is modularity the reason why recombination is so u…

Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…

Genetic diversity is central to the process of evolution. Both natural selection and random genetic drift are influenced by the level of genetic diversity of a population; selection acts on diversity while drift samples from it. At a given…

These notes introduce probabilistic landscape models defined on high-dimensional discrete sequence spaces. The models are motivated primarily by fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology, but links to statistical physics and computer…

Interconnected ensembles of biological entities are perhaps some of the most complex systems that modern science has encountered so far. In particular, scientists have concentrated on understanding how the complexity of the interacting…

A precise estimate of allele and haplotype polymorphism is of great interest in theoretical population genetics, but also has practical applications, such as bone marrow registries management. Allele polymorphism is driven mainly by point…

The evolution of species habitat range is an important topic over a wide range of research fields. In higher organisms, habitat range evolution is generally associated with genetic events such as gene duplication. However, the specific…

Evolution depends on the possibility of successfully exploring fitness landscapes via mutation and recombination. With these search procedures, exploration is difficult in "rugged" fitness landscapes, where small mutations can drastically…

It has recently been suggested that evolution exploits a form of fitness landscape smoothing within eukaryotic sex due to the haploid-diploid cycle. This short paper presents a simple modification to the standard evolutionary computing…

Functional effects of different mutations are known to combine to the total effect in highly nontrivial ways. For the trait under evolutionary selection (`fitness'), measured values over all possible combinations of a set of mutations yield…

A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…

This paper uses the recent idea that the fundamental haploid-diploid lifecycle of eukaryotic organisms implements a rudimentary form of learning within evolution. A general approach for evolutionary computation is here derived that differs…

We discuss two different ways of chromosomes' and genomes' evolution. Purifying selection dominates in large panmictic populations, where Mendelian law of independent gene assortment is valid. If the populations are small, recombination…

Genetic redundancy is ubiquitous and can be found in any organism. However, it has been argued that genetic redundancy reduces total population fitness, and therefore, redundancy is unlikely to evolve. In this letter, we study an…

The persistence of life requires populations to adapt at a rate commensurate with the dynamics of their environment. Successful populations that inhabit highly variable environments have evolved mechanisms to increase the likelihood of…

The benefit of sexual recombination is one of the most fundamental questions both in population genetics and evolutionary computation. It is widely believed that recombination helps solving difficult optimization problems. We present the…

This article deals with the emergence of a specific mating preference pattern called homogamy in a population. Individuals are characterized by their genotype at two haploid loci, and the population dynamics is modelled by a non-linear…

We investigate a continuous time, probability measure-valued dynamical system that describes the process of mutation-selection balance in a context where the population is infinite, there may be infinitely many loci, and there are weak…

Sex in higher diploids carries a two-fold cost of males that should reduce its fitness relative to cloning and result in its extinction. Instead, sex is widespread and it is clonal species that face early obsolescence. One possible reason…

Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…

Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…